4.3 What Kind of Being Does the Human Being Have?
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 4.3 Was für eine Art von Sein hat der Mensch?
So far we have gathered the tools: form and matter, actuality and potentiality. Now we apply them.
4.3.1 Independent Beings and Added Properties
The most important distinction we need here is the one between an independent being and an added property. Or, in technical language: between substance and accident.
An independent being is something that stands in itself. It is not “something attached to something else,” but something in its own right.
Is a human being’s personhood such an added property — or is it the independent being itself?
If personhood were a mere property — like hair color or shoe size — then it could be added and taken away. That is exactly what some philosophers claim. They say: personhood is a property that one has or does not have.
But this view is false. As early as the sixth century, Boethius recognized: “Because the person cannot exist outside of nature, and because of the natures that exist some are substances and the others accidents — and because we see that person cannot be located among the accidents (for who would say that whiteness, blackness, or size had any person?), it therefore remains that person is predicated as being among the substances.”1
4.3.2 Personhood Is Not a Feature, but Underlying Being
All of a human being’s capacities — his thinking, his willing, his feeling, his acting — presuppose that someone is there who thinks, wills, feels, and acts. The capacities need a bearer. And this bearer is the person.
Personhood, then, is not one capacity among others. It is what underlies all capacities. It is not something that is added to the human being, but what the human being fundamentally is. It is, in the language of the tradition, “first actuality” — the being that precedes all doing and makes it possible in the first place.
Think of a human being in deep sleep. He is not thinking at the moment. He is not feeling at the moment. He is not acting at the moment. Is he therefore no longer a person? Of course not. He is a sleeping person. His personhood has not vanished merely because his capacities are at rest.
Now the decisive step: what holds for the sleeper, the anesthetized, and the person with dementia holds equally for the embryo. In the embryo the personal capacities are not dormant because they are damaged, but because they are not yet unfolded. But personhood, that which underlies, is there.
Personhood is first actuality. Whoever makes personhood depend on the exercise of capacities confuses the ground of being with its expressions. He mistakes the fire for its smoke.
4.3.3 What Kind of Being?
To determine the human being’s mode of being more precisely still, one can single out eight features that characterize the being of the human being (here we follow a proposal by the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, who worked out these concepts).2
The human being is, in Ingarden’s terminology, an ontologically autonomous, ontologically derived, ontologically self-sufficient, and ontologically dependent being. That means: he exists from his own ground of being (he is no mere part of another being), but his being is given to him (he did not call himself into existence). He is an independent whole (no mere function of something else), but he needs other things in order to continue in existence (food, community, love).
This combination of independence and relatedness is no contradiction. It is what is distinctive about being human. The human being is an independent being that by its nature is ordered toward others — an independent being in relation.
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Fußnoten
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Boethius, De persona et duabus naturis, cap. 3: “Persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia.” ↩
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Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt (The Controversy over the Existence of the World) (1964), vol. I: Existentialontologie, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1964, §§ 12–18. Ingarden distinguishes eight existential moments of being in four pairs. ↩